


sweet sun, send me the moon

by arahir



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Protectiveness, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-06-28 22:57:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15716814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arahir/pseuds/arahir
Summary: Shiro still has one battle left to fight.Keith's body in his arms doesn't twitch and his eyes don't flicker. They're open a little, Shiro realizes; dull, sightless slits of white. Not dead, though. He’s not dead. Damaged, yes, but they can fix this.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> a series of requests and one-shots post s7.

Shiro doesn’t find out about the Lions until later, until Atlas is detransformed and parked and that turns out to be an ordeal all its own, one that occupies him for hours. Piloting Atlas takes as much from him as the Black Lion did—more, in some ways, but it gives, too. By the time they’re back on solid ground, Shiro is exhausted down to his bones and alive like he hasn't been in years.

He needs it. That energy, that faith, that confidence are all that get him through the next two days. That's how long it takes them to dig Keith out of his Lion.

Two days.

Hunk and Lance land hard in the desert. The rescue missions only take a few hours and when they pull them out, they’re banged up to hell and back, but it’s exhaustion that’s hurt them more than anything. Pidge lands in the forest up in the hills and that makes it the softest landing, by far. Allura lands in the ocean, but it’s shallow there and they have aquatic craft. It takes half a day, all told, and the worst injury between them all is a minor concussion and a few pulled muscles.

Keith is different. Keith lands like a falling star and it’s less a landing than a crash and less a crash than a plummet. Shiro watches it through the Atlas’s viewscreen—watches all of them, but can’t tear his eyes away from that violet streak. Distantly, it’s humorous, but in the driest way and then the trajectory of his Lion becomes obvious and horrifying and all humor dies. The Lion plows into bare earth and skids for meters and meters and then Shiro can’t see it anymore because buildings and spires obscure it.

Keith lands on the Garrison.

The initial impact leaves him buried in meters and tons of rock and rubble, but as a final insult, he manages to tap the main structure and collapse the side of it, taking out a classroom and part of the cadet dorms. That’s the hardest part. It’s not digging the Lion out—Shiro could do that in a minute in Atlas, or move rubble with his bare hands if it came to that—but that six people end up buried with him.

They tally up the list of the missing and Iverson passes it on to him that evening. The only real mercy is that most were outside to watch the fight. It could have been worse, they agree. It's still bad.

Standing by the smoking wreck of it all, taller than him five times over, all Shiro can think is that it’s a strange justice that in years of fighting an intergalactic war, in years of death and magic and strange alliances, a simple fall is as hard a challenge as any they’ve faced.

No—that irony doesn’t bite until later. At that moment, it still seems simple. Iverson turns to him and sighs. “If we move the Lion, we could crush them.”

Keith is down there, too, Shiro’s mind says in time with his heartbeat, the image of Keith limned in sun, jumping out of the Lion with his blade drawn, Sendak in his sights, playing endlessly in his mind. He closes his eyes, tries for the third time that day to connect with the Black Lion in some way, but it’s not dead in the water—their connection is gone and he can’t work with nothing.

It’s not really a question and no one needs his permission, but Shiro breathes, tries one more time, and says, “Okay. Get them out.”

The Lion kept him alive for months. It can keep Keith alive for however long this takes—hours, maybe a day. It has to. None of the other Paladins were injured lethally and Keith is half-Galra, strong in the most extreme sense, stronger than Shiro, even. Keith is untouchable in a mythic way that Shiro has never understood but always appreciated. Now, it gives him hope.

“How long will it take?” someone asks from behind them.

Iverson turns. “We’re already working on it. A day, at most—”

“But what about the wolf? Can’t it get him?”

“If he could, he would have.” Shiro tries to keep his voice level. They watched Kosmo teleport around the Lion with frantic speed for minutes after the dust cleared, but it seems solid rock is more of a barrier than the vacuum of space. He's under Coran’s care now, because Coran has always had an odd understanding for Keith and his ways and his things.

“We’re doing everything we can,” Iverson says a bit desperately. They are.

“But can't you—”

“Griffin!”

The cadet flinches back and whips to attention before he dismisses himself. No, he’s an officer now, Shiro reminds himself. Griffin. Of course it's Griffin. Shiro watches him go, exhaustion dragging at his mind and body, not sure if he’s amused or frustrated that someone else wants Keith out as much as he does.

Iverson turns back to him with regret pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Shiro, I'm sorry. But he's a fighter.”

The sun is starting to set. The dust in the air colors it bloody. _He's a fighter._ Shiro knows that better than any of them. He’s cleaned Keith up after his fights, carried him out, made excuses. He’s _been_ the fight. That moment at the facility, watching Keith fall from afar, trying to reach him, is overlaid in his mind with the dual sensation of a hand around his wrist, gripped painfully tight.

He’d had a bruise there later, formless and dark over his forearm, testament to that fact: Keith is a fighter.

_That’s not why you love him though._

 

* * *

 

The rescue is made difficult by a myriad of little complications Shiro absorbs and pushes aside with increasing unease. There are six people trapped in the wreckage and in the end it doesn’t take hours to get them out, or even a day. It takes two.

Two days.

It’s like being fatally late for a deadline, feeling it close in around him with a dawning terror. it reminds him of his seven days in the Galra fighter, winging toward Voltron without hope or prayer or food or water. He wonders what Keith is thinking about and then wonders if he’s thinking at all and loses his last hour of sleep to that question.

If Keith was awake, he’d have found a way out. They can’t separate his signs of life from the people still trapped in the rubble, they can’t reach the hatch or the auxiliary hatch, they can’t wake up the Lion, they can’t teleport in to get him, they can’t do anything. Shiro imagines him asleep in there like he slept after they lost the Castleship, curled there in the seat. Someone had to be on watch, he’d said, and Shiro was too worn then to argue the point.

It’s an image he recreates as best he can—Keith’s hair falling over his face, mouth open, quiet in sleep.

The morning of the second day, Sam kicks him out of a meeting and orders him to get breakfast, or at least coffee. They’re organizing space for refugees that are already making their way to system and Shiro is trying to contend with his months spent as part of the Lion and the revelation that the galaxy had three years to fall into chaos while they were all between spaces.

“You know, you’re not literally Atlas, Shiro,” Sam says kindly when he pulls Shiro aside, setting a hand on his shoulder in the nearest thing to fatherly anyone alive would dare to be with him.

It feels like he should be. It feels like he should be able to hold up at least this much.

Shiro observes the rescue when he can, helps when he can, but they need him in other places more and there’s not much he can do but get in the way. A hundred and one times, Shiro thinks there’s something else they might have done, but they’re too set on the current path. He could tear the rubble off the Lion without injuring anyone; he could dig underneath it; he could transform Atlas and pick the whole thing up. He nearly does in a moment of madness, but then he imagines Keith’s expression if he found out someone had died in the extraction and can’t do it.

Someone dies, anyway.

Shiro gets the call in the evening when he’s worrying his way through another meeting on a new squad of MFEs and excuses himself quietly. They all knew it was touch and go. They all knew there was a chance of it, but it’s hard to hear. They don’t have people to lose and Keith will regret this in his way. He’ll blame himself, as if he had a choice in it.

The girl is a third year cadet, the same rank as Keith when he dropped out. Shiro notices the bars on her coat as they carry her out. Black haired and sweet-faced, dark skin gone palid in death.

No one speaks when she’s brought up. Iverson identifies her, but they all know her name—she’s the last one missing off their list. Shiro tries not to feel relieved. Part of him is, though. Two days is two days too long and each consequent hour has broken him down to his constituent regrets and now, finally, he can focus it all on one singular purpose.

Still, he can’t take his eyes off the body until it’s out of sight. Sleep loss has him raw around the edges. He knows what she reminds him of— _who_ she reminds him of—but he forces the thought down and makes himself step away toward the mess of wreckage.

It’s as daunting as it was at first blush. They’ve done what they could to remove rubble from the main hatch, per Shiro’s instruction, but it’s still going to take time. He starts lifting away blocks and and rebar until he’s in a trance. Grip, lift, move, on repeat. The thump of concrete landing after he tosses it aside becomes a second heartbeat, slower, steadier, a counterpoint to his own which is beating too fast.

With agonizing slowness, the hatch reveals itself. It looks like the gate to a lost tomb, unearthed there in the desert, waiting and waiting years unnumbered for someone to find it.

_Two days._

“Sir.”

The word breaks through his trance, but he keeps the way one-two-three rhythm he has going, for lack of anything else to do with his hands and this persistent nervous energy that won't let him rest.

“Captain,” the voice repeats. Shiro looks at him, finally—makes himself, because his motions are going robotic. It's the MFE crew.

He ends up needing every hand he can get.

It takes, with Shiro’s help, five of them to wrench the main hatch open. The Lion is forged to seamless perfection, built to survive war and the vacuum of space. It's a wonder they get it open at all. The sound of metal grating against metal as it finally gives is horrid.

It's too loud for the occasion, too brash. He doesn't let himself imagine what they’ll find inside.

Cold is the first sensation that registers and he's been sweating with his work. It's uncharacteristically dark, too. No purple glow of circuits and flashing indicators, no life to it at all. The angle makes it awkward; he has to slide down the floor of the antechamber once he gets inside and then there's the second door. It goes easier than the first. Griffin and Kinkade slide down after him.

He doesn't know what he expected. That image of Keith, seated in place like a doll left after play, limp and quiet and whole. That isn't what he gets. The socket of Shiro's arm lights up the dark and dust well enough to see: the pilot's seat is empty.

For one long, dawning moment, Shiro thinks this is history repeating itself. Keith is dead, the dregs of his soul sucked into that liminal star-lit space, but this time they don't have a spare body to shove him in. If there's enough of him left to pull out, if Allura can. His ears are ringing and he can’t make himself move until a soft sound echoes from beside him.

“Captain.”

Kinkade. He motions to the front of the cockpit. Shiro turns and finally, he sees the figure slumped there. No—it looks like a pile of cracked, discarded armor more than a body.

Keith.

Shiro slides toward him, the arm flying ahead of him to turn Keith's body over as gently as he can manage it, trying not to damage anything worse. He's close enough to use his human hand when he turns Keith's head and then Shiro’s body stops cold, frozen in place. Behind him, one of the cadets takes a sharp breath and someone else’s throat clicks as they swallow.

The front of Keith's helmet is shattered inward. The light of Shiro’s arm glances and glitters off the cracks and shards of it.

There's blood dried black over Keith’s pale skin, hair stuck across his forehead with it and with the sweat that must have stuck it there. _He's dead,_ Shiro thinks distantly. There’s no part of him hidden safe in the Lion's secret conscious, no wondrous way to retrieve him back from the abyss like he retrieved Shiro time and time again. This is all he gets, because Keith is flesh and bone and that's breakable. It was always breakable. Absently, he brushes his gloved fingers along the edge of shattered glass, clearing it away as best he can. The fall of it across Keith’s armor and the floor is the only audible sound in the quiet.

Shiro’s breath won’t come. As long as he holds it, he won’t have to move on from this moment.

“Keith.” The name wants to be a plea or a prayer or a question, but it gets lost between it all and comes out just that—a name. Shiro works his fingers under the helmet and presses them to the column of Keith's neck in a perfunctory check and then almost rips his hand back in shock.

His skin is warm. Shiro changes angles, presses harder, and there it is—a heartbeat, slow and faint.

He lifts Keith into his arms and turns back, already moving. “He's alive. We need to get him the the medics.” They’re nonsense words. Of course they do. The cadets are still staring at Keith, but at his words they kick into gear and make a chain out of their bodies to the first door, pulling Shiro and his cargo up with them.

The new arm is cumbersome, but its size is good for something. He can cradle most of Keith to his chest while they go.

Outside, it’s past sunset, but there’s still enough light to see by. It’s worse, somehow. Keith’s armor is cracked in at least three other places, most of it scuffed, some of the black webbing torn, exposing skin and open wounds. The panels over the arms of the Paladin armor are exceptionally strong, but the joints have always been a weak point—the way Keith’s left arm is hanging makes it look over extended and twisted. Something's dislocated, or worse. Mentally, Shiro tries to tally the day of the crash in reverse and realizes there are a dozen ways, a dozen places he could have been wounded before Voltron ever transformed.

“Help me get his helmet off.”

Griffin leaps to comply. His fingers are shaking, Shiro notices, but together they lift it away with as much precision and care as they can muster.

Keith’s face is a wreck underneath it.

The right side of his head is matted over entirely, blood sticking the hair to his skull in one dried mass, coloring it a duller black. It's macabre. His eyelashes are stuck together with it and there’s blood under his nose, run over his lips and chin.  He's seen Keith hurt—he's seen all of the Paladins hurt—but not like this. He wants to touch it, wipe his face clean, run his fingers over the worst of it, but it’s for the medics now. The risk of making it worse is too dire.

When he looks up, Griffin’s face is an off-color white and Kinkade behind him doesn't look much better. Shiro turns away from them half a step, shielding Keith and his own terror, wanting a moment of privacy while he gets it under control.

“Keith?” he tries once.

The body in his arms doesn't twitch and his eyes don't flicker. They're open a little, Shiro realizes; dull, sightless slits of white. Not dead, though. He’s not dead. Damaged, yes, but they can fix this.

“We'll take him, sir,” offers the medic Shiro didn't notice. He can’t move immediately.

“Captain?” the woman amends when he doesn’t answer.

He hands Keith off to them so slowly it must frustrate, but his new arm clings with a kind of reluctance, trying to keep some physical connection between them. If the medics are annoyed, they don't show it. Shiro doesn't see they've gathered a crowd until he's following the stretcher back to the infirmary.

No one speaks. Shiro’s been busy in his own grief and worry, but Keith is a hero now. Of course, people would know. Of course, they would want him safe. Of course, they would be here for this. He’s not only Shiro’s anymore and this is what he always wanted for Keith, but it’s a bitter revelation there.

On an impulse, he strips off his uniform jacket and spreads it over Keith, pulling it up to his chin to cover him without implying the worst. He moves to walk beside Keith, letting his legs and body obscure what he can, catching what gazes he can’t and redirecting. _He’s fine,_ he tries to school his expression to say. He’ll be fine. He will be.

He tries to believe it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [[on tumblr](http://arahir.tumblr.com/post/177109562930/for-your-hospital-story-keith-being-the-last-one)] [[on twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir/status/1030601127404888064)]


	2. Chapter 2

“It was a head wound. That’s why he bled so much, but his vitals are good. The arm…”

The arm is in a sling. Not broken, after all, but dislocated badly. It’s hard to take an impact that hard—and all of him took it. That was the worst of it. The initial blow threw him out of his seat, bashed his head in on the control panel at a speed Shiro can’t contemplate, and there he lay until Shiro found him. The medics explain it in kind words and Shiro tries to feel more the Captain and less the helpless friend.

Watching Keith lie there, he doesn’t feel like anything. _Two days,_ his mind runs on and on. _You let him lie there for two days like this._

No food, no water, and even if they’d gotten him to a medic that afternoon, it would have been bad. The doctors are being nice because of his rank and Keith’s rank and because this is an optimism they all need to share.

He looks like he got runover. With the armor stripped away, the bruises and cuts over his body are apparent. They still don’t know how much of it was the fight and how much was the crash. It doesn’t matter. The end result is the same.

He sits by the bed for hours. It's not time he has to spare, but he can't leave. Keith doesn't twitch or shift; his heart rate never changes, and his breath never stutters. There’s not enough of it in him to raise his chest on the inhale, even. The only movement comes when the nurse has to check his IV drip and after that Shiro feels foolish for wasting their space and time.

 

* * *

 

They promise to call him first if there’s any change. Krolia is still off planet, but word’s gone out. Until she gets there, no one can tell Shiro it’s not his place to be at the top of the list.

No word comes in that day. He goes back that evening, anyway. Hurry up and wait, they say, and that's how it feels. The infirmary isn't a proper hospital, but they can handle this much. Most rooms are full; Shiro knows it's a privilege they've given the Paladins privacy, but it's one he's glad for.

Keith gets one visitor in the evening. The wolf follows Coran in the room. They've named him Kosmo, but it's not Keith's name for him, so Shiro tries not to use it—less for the wolf’s sake than the risk of incurring Keith's quiet wrath.

Shiro is glad for the company in the silence. Kosmo butts up against him where he's seated by the bed, datapad forgotten in his lap but glowing dully.

“Think he'll wake up soon?” Shiro asks, scratching his ears.

Kosmo pushes into the touch and tries to lick his fingers. He doesn't have any answers. Shiro remembers Keith's stubborn insistence that he’d have no name until he choose one and smiles. It's nice not to be the only one in Keith's corner.

Coran leaves them with a few kind words. He knows Keith in a different way. Shiro isn't sure what went on while he was between spaces, but Coran seems to know. He lays a hand on Keith's chest and the other on Kosmo's back and smiles at them both and then at Shiro. "He needs a bit of rest," Coran offers and goes.

Keith grew while he was away. Shiro hasn’t had time to appreciate that fact. In bed, in sleep, he doesn’t look older. His legs seem oddly long under the sheets and he’s always been thin, but now his limbs seem too lithe. His cheekbones stick out too far and there are bruises under his eyes. His jaw could always cut, but now it’s distinguished. He’s all grown up, Shiro thinks, but it’s as anguished a thought as it is proud.

Keith is a personal hurt. He thinks of Keith jumping out of the Lion, saving him for the umpteenth time, cutting Sendak down in the sun and dust. Keith was tired, then. He was beat and worn and imprisoned and still, _still_ found a way to him. No one else would do that for Shiro. No one else could.

And now his clutch is down and out.

The other Paladins wake up one by one. Pidge is the first, and then Allura and Hunk and Lance. He visits them all and enjoys the excuse to waste an hour with friends. He plays happy messenger between Lance and Allura and tries to pick the moment where that changed, tries to figure out why the little drawing Lance gives him to put at Allura’s bedside makes his chest tight with more than pride and more than humor.

They ask about Keith and he gives them all the same story: he fell hard and he’s still asleep, but he’ll be fine.

Someone sends Keith flowers. Shiro walks in one day to find them in a vase next to a card signed by the nurse staff and another from Iverson that’s less card than a folded piece of Galaxy Garrison stationary, scawled over with his messy script on both sides. Shiro leaves both untouched but checks the water in the vase and wonders why it didn’t occur to him to bring gifts first.

It's not much of a distraction, but it's the only one he gets.

Three days in, Keith is the only one still asleep. His doctors say it's situation normal—his body knows he’s been hurt and sleep is a kind of self-defense mechanism. He needs time and that's all they can give him now. Shiro sticks around after they leave, until the nurses come to give him his bath, but something about watching them manipulate Keith's body with all his long, pale limbs on display is too much.

They offer to let him help. He realizes they've mistaken his position there as something more personal than it is and excuses himself quietly—and then wonders on the walk back how it could get more personal.

The next day he picks up a little bouquet of strange flowers from the new market that’s growing in the ruins of the old city and adds them to the vase. Red, of course, because that’s what caught his eye first and he’s tired of seeing Keith surrounded by Garrison beige and orange and the delicate, pale pink of the other flowers. Keith deserves red. Keith deserves roses that bite and defy. Keith deserves lillies and daisies and the scrubby desert cactus blooms he used to admire on their rises. Not these pale, conciliatory things.

More gifts show up: little tokens of gratitude, letters, a little velvet box with a medal inside. There’ll be others later and a proper ceremony, but this is enough for now. This is all they can give.

Shiro gets into a pattern. He comes in the morning, tries not to be disappointed when Keith’s still asleep, and wastes a few minutes reorganizing his room, smoothing his sheets, checking his bandages—because of course, he knows more than the hospital staff do about it. No. It’s a nervous gesture, at best. In the evenings, he refills the water in the vase, picks out the dead flowers, and leaves when the silence starts to get to him.

It feels like being in limbo. At the week mark, he yells in a meeting and has to excuse himself. There’s no one to delegate to, no one to commiserate with in the hallway, no second person to take on everything that needs doing. Iverson and Sam do their best, but it’s different. No change, no movement. Keith looks like a living doll, something sleeping in wait. For what, Shiro can’t tell. If he knew, he would give it.

He would give it a hundred times over.

 

* * *

 

That night he breaks. It’s two in the morning and sleep is a myth, a dream once he had. Now when he closes his eyes all he can see is Keith’s half-corpse limned in blue light, shattered glass making his face and hair glitter in the Lion's dead cockpit. The second time he wakes up with Keith’s name on his lips and regret clouding his mind, he lets himself get up and pull on a minimum of clothing and walk down to the infirmary.

 _Just to check,_ he tells himself.

The nurse on duty barely looks up from her book, nodding as she passes. Visiting hours don’t apply to him. He wonders if it’s a nod to his position or a nod to somethin else. His position with Keith, maybe. People keep making assumptions and Shiro is torn between flattery and denial. Keith means the world to him, but that doesn’t mean—what they assume it does. It can’t be that between them. Of course, it’s not.

When he walks into the room, it’s still dark, but Keith isn’t alone.

It takes Shiro a moment to recognize the figure standing next to his bed. He opens his mouth to say Griffin’s name, but his voice seizes in his throat because of course, the kid is crying. They’re quiet tears, spots of reflected light below his eyes because Shiro forgot to draw the curtains. It’s an understated sorrow. It’s something Shiro wishes he could share.

His first inclination is to leave them be, but the second is anger and it’s stronger. This stranger doesn’t have a right to sorrow—not over this. Shiro hasn’t cried over it yet and if anyone has a right to, it’s him. He’s not going to, though. Adam wasn’t enough to cry over, and they had years together, a thousand perfect moments, a history that couldn’t be shared or described. Maybe he will, later. Now this is the only sorrow in him and it’s too overwhelming for something so average. Keith isn’t worth tears. Keith is worth anger _._

He draws himself back, breathes and thinks. Keith is still alive, and he’s not Adam. He never was. Shiro opens his mouth, words he doesn’t mean dancing on the tip of his tongue, ready to burst out, but Griffin sees him before he can speak.

The boy turns and the look on this face isn't shame or shock but that same sorrow, as if it’s one they share. Shiro is horrified to find they do. “Is he going to wake up?”

It hadn't occurred to Shiro he wouldn't, but now, for the first time, that worry rises in him. Of course, he'll wake up. _But,_ his mind echoes.

But.

“He’s fine,” Shiro says. His voice feels like the wind coming in through the cracked window. It’s a hint, a suggestion, a hope. It’s been a week, though. Shiro let him sit in pain and blood for two days and now he’s slept for a week and maybe that’s too much. Maybe, after everything, it would be a kind of cursed and poetic tragedy that it’s Shiro’s bad judgment that brings Keith down.

Krolia and Kolivan are set to arrive the next day and Shiro has been telling himself that will be a balm somehow, but now he wonders for the first time if Krolia won’t be angry with him. _Two days?_ she’ll ask and Kolivan will watch him with that silent way of his, condemning.

“He’ll wake up soon,” Shiro adds.

James doesn’t respond. He wipes his eyes and walks out past Shiro and after that, there’s no dignity left in Shiro to stay and watch Keith sleep away all Shiro's mistakes.

 

* * *

 

There's nothing he can do, he realizes. He can worry about Keith’s dog and Keith’s Lion and Keith’s head, but he can’t fix any of it. He can’t go back in time and throw caution to the wind, dig Keith out with tooth and nail, find the girl’s corpse and mourn and push it away when Keith can open his eyes and smile.

But maybe that was already too late. Maybe the impact was what did it. Maybe if he’d found the strength to do more than stand and watch, this would all be better.

Krolia arrives. He can’t look her in the eye when she gets off her ship, Kolivan in tow as Shiro leads them to Keith's room. She lays a familiar hand on his shoulder when they get there and Shiro takes it as leave to go. To his shame, he can’t bring himself to come back after that. One week bleeds into two and Shiro’s shame is a second skin he carries with him. Atlas is whole, and Voltron is broken and Keith is hurt—and it’s his fault.

He brings flowers twice more, though. He can manage that much. Each time, Krolia and Kolivan are there, watching with open eyes. He makes excuses for his business, half-lies they nod at and let him keep. He can’t be there. He can’t watch. He can’t talk to a body that looks more a corpse than a friend. He can’t beg Keith to come back. He can’t tell him how hard it is to lead alone. It's too selfish, anyway.

 

* * *

 

“Any news?”

Two weeks in, Shiro’s settled into despair. The other Paladins are well enough. They move the Lions to the stage for his speech with their minds alone and Shiro is as impressed as he is lost. Hunk and Pidge use their own to carry the Black Lion to its spot behind the podium and position it there at optimistic attention. Keith is well, it seems to say. He just needs time.

Shiro can’t bring himself to believe that’s true anymore. Even the doctors have gone silent. The nurses smile tightly when they see him walk in. _No change,_ they tell him. But who knows. Keith is a special case. No one is willing to make assumptions or ultimatums.

Krolia looks up at him from her seat. It can’t be comfortable, sitting there perched at the edge of his bed as she has been every time he’s been there. She breathes, something less than a sigh, and that’s all the answer he’s going to get.

“I’ve seen him come through more than I could imagine. He’ll be fine,” Shiro says for the both of them, unsure where the words are coming from. He’s always wanted to be his best self for her. She’s half of Keith and Shiro is fascinated and flustered as much as scared.

Krolia doesn’t reply. She pushes Keith’s bangs to the side and Shiro has to watch as she presses a kiss to his forehead. “He’s my only child,” she says softly, “and he's so good. I never dreamed I would be so lucky.”

The words unsettle him. Shiro wants children. He’s always wanted them; even when Adam and he were an inevitable thing, some future with long Sunday mornings and little arguments. In the Lion’s plane, he had one brief, beautiful dream of Keith with children, and himself there too in some strange capacity he couldn’t give a mind or voice to. He would be an incredible parent. Shiro tries to imagine having something perfect to care for and love and having to leave it—twice. He tries to imagine watching it lying in a hospital bed after two weeks and thinks with a wryness: _I know what that’s like_.

But he doesn’t. Keith isn’t his—not in that way. Keith is a distant, changing thing. A dozen images overlay in his mind. Keith is what he pulled out of jail with a pittance hundred credit bail on their second meeting and Keith is a bruised kid waiting for a reprimand and Keith is the pair of hands he wakes up to after year of torture and an explosive crash, and the thing that pulls him out of a Galra fighter after a week without food or water. Blue eyes and messy hair, the smile he saves for Shiro, the arch of his neck when he turns away, Keith is the thing that pulls him back from the brink and the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes after dying and dying again.

Some part of him has grown to expect it. It’s a fatal arrogance. Keith is brittle bone and young, besides. He was never something to hang a life and hope on. Not without reciprocity. Not without giving something in return.

Krolia looks at him, finally. “Your speech is tomorrow,” she offers. Her eyes are shadowed, but yellow. Familiar.

Shiro nods and tries to measure his breaths. The new arm and Atlas have given him a strength he didn’t think he’d have again—he feels energized, but he still doesn’t know how to say everything he needs to. He doesn’t know how to say any of it when he knows Keith won’t be there. None of the Paladins will. He’s torn because there were months he never dreamed he’d come back to Earth, but every time he envisioned it, it was there waiting for him.

Rebuilding it isn’t something he was prepared to do. But he will. They all will.

The lights start to fade out in the hallways. The sun’s been down for an hour already. It’s a sunset. Keith is always beautiful at sunset, even like this. “Let me know if he wakes up,” Shiro says—the same thing he’s said every time.

She nods and lets him go.

 

* * *

 

When the speech ends, there’s minutes of applause. More than is warranted, in Shiro’s opinion, but it makes his chest heat with more than embarrassment. He’s useful, needed, and the next step isn’t clear but as long as they’re moving forward, it's something.

He steps off the stage and pulls the datapad out of his pocket just to check. The message at the top of the screen makes his steps falter; he almost trips over his own feet.

_He’s awake._

And:

_He doesn’t remember._

The words don’t register in full at that moment. He sprints his way to the infirmary. Keith doesn't remember the fall or the fight or some other detail they were counting on him for. They can work past it. It takes many minutes for something worse and greater than excitement to kick up in his chest and it still doesn’t fully hit until he’s standing at the door. It’s still open; Krolia and Kolivan are both in the room and Shiro can see them clearly before he can see the bed. Kolivan is smiling to himself; he never did in space but maybe that much death changes a person. It changed Shiro.

They both look up when he walks in; both their expressions change, but he registers it only at the edge of his mind. His eyes are on Keith.

And Keith’s eyes are curious and bright—and blank.

“Keith,” he says, stepping into the room. It’s obvious there’s something wrong. Krolia isn’t sitting on the bed anymore and Kolivan’s smile is wistful in the strangest way.

Keith clears his throat and says softly, “I’m sorry.”

It’s a haze later, though he remembers it clearly. Krolia bustles him out of the room with a hand on his shoulder before he can say something he’ll regret. She explains the situation as best she can. They knew it was a risk when they first pulled him out of the Lion. Shiro knew it when he pulled the blood-matted hair from Keith’s face temple. It’s not a surprise he doesn’t remember them, but it hurts.

“They said he’d be fine,” Shiro tells her and wants to pull the words back to his mouth as soon as he voices them.

This, somehow, is more personal. This, somehow, bites. He gave a speech on death with the dozen pictures of the lost sitting next to him on the stage and Adam’s face fooling him, playing before his eyes, shadowing the faces of a dozen strangers in the crowd, but this, somehow, is what brings him down to earth.

She smiles at him, almost pitying. “It’s temporary.” Krolia’s voice is so lovely. She re-settles the hand on his shoulder, squeezing, and she really is so much like Keith in all the good ways that count.

He wants to ask her how she can be calm when her son doesn’t know her face. He wants to ask how he’s supposed to take this in stride. She says it’s temporary, but what if it isn’t? Loss is an old companion by now.

“I think he’ll be happy to see you, Shiro.” She squeezes again and nudges him toward the door. He has to take a moment to close his eyes and center himself before he walks back in.

Keith’s eyes are on him the moment he steps through the door, still wondering. It’s good just to see them open. Kolivan makes an excuse and closes the door behind him as he goes, leaving them in privacy Shiro isn’t sure he wants. He makes himself move forward. The new arm drags behind him. It’s a creature of his subconscious.

Once before, in a strategy meeting, it strayed to Keith’s thigh before he knew what it was doing. Keith didn’t glance up, didn’t acknowledge it, and once Shiro realized where it was he was too scared to move it. It wasn’t untoward, but it was too personal. He’d thought about it that night and wondered wryly how anything could be too personal after all they’d been through—and told himself off for a fool for that, too.

“I’m Shiro,” he introduces himself. The words take something from him. _It's temporary,_ he reminds me of himself, and holds out a hand. The left one, by habit, but Keith stares at him for a moment and then at the proffered hand and smiles as he lifts his own.

Shiro’s metal hand meets it of its own accord.

“Keith, I think.” His voice is still rough with sleep and his right hand is too covered in bandages to shake as much as hold. Shiro’s new arm can feel every edge. “We know each other?”

Shiro tries to say yes, but the word dies a little death against the thing in his throat, so he nods instead. Keith frowns at whatever expression he’s making, but he doesn’t let go of the hand until Shiro turns to pull a chair in.

“Do you have any questions?” Shiro asks when he’s settled.

Keith looks down and picks at the blankets. He looks a little more rested, a little less pained. When he raises his head, his gaze pierces unwittingly. He's always had the most arresting eyes. “How do we know each other?”

It’s such a simple question. There are hundred good, simple answers. A dozen humorous ones, a few more heartfelt, one that’s better than the rest. Keith will come back to himself and remember everything and Shiro’s just given a long speech—perfect words are on the tip of his tongue, but his eyes lock on Keith’s and the cut of his cheekbone and then the mark Shiro’s blade left on his face.

 _I gave you that scar,_ he wants to say, _and you saved me._ What comes out instead is more measured, more honest in a better way. He smiles when the phrase comes to him and says, “Without you, my life would have been a whole lot different.”

The full explanation takes longer than he expects. Longer than it should. Longer than Keith needs it to, when he’s just woken up off a two-week coma, but once Shiro starts, he can’t stop. He tells Keith everything. At some point his left hand ends up on Keith’s. His right he keeps stuck fast to his own thigh because the open, wondering look on Keith's face is marred by the way they wrapped his head and tied his bangs down and he'd like a clear view of his eyes when he gets to the part about the fight and doesn’t trust that hand not to seek it out.

“That's how you got the scar.” _I gave it to you after you told me you loved me._

Keith hasn't spoken in minutes. He lifts a hand to his cheek and traces over it. “How did I win?” He looks Shiro up and down, a little wondering. It does something to the ebb and flow of Shiro’s blood through his face.

It's well after dark. By rights he should be gone. The lamp by the bed is the lesser light in the room compared to the blue-white from his arm and together they turn Keith's eyes the most fascinating shade of blue.

“You summoned your Bayard.” _My Bayard, but I wanted you to have it, always._ “It's a weapon—like a sword.”

Keith huffs. “Two swords? Isn't that overkill?” he asks. Earlier Shiro mimed his Marmora blade transforming in what he’d attempted to make a stirring reenactment of his trial. It made Keith smile, if nothing else

It's also sweet that of all the things he would find unbelievable, out of robots and wormholes and magic, the thing that gets him is a second sword.

“Keith…” Shiro smiles and has to duck his head to hide it and the persistent blush that’s trying to creep up his neck because this is like impressing a stranger and a long walk with an old friend in one, “...you are the definition of overkill.”

Keith reds around his ears, smiles absently at their hands and then at the pile of gifts on the table across the room. “I wish I could remember.”

He should go. Keith needs rest. It's not like him that he would overstep by keeping him from it, but two weeks of constant worry don't leave easy. Half of him owed Keith the honesty and half of him wanted the excuse to stay.

“You will.” Shiro squeezes his hand and stands. “I'll be back tomorrow—if you're not busy.”

Keith snorts. “I'll try and fit you in.” He's not looking at Shiro, though. He's staring across the room still, at the dozens of hand-cut hand-drawn cards and the wildflowers someone found and cut and dried for him. There's a little black stuffed toy dog that someone has sewn a white mane onto in a parody of Kosmo. A frown worms its way across Keith's face. He's always been a worrier. After he gave up the facade of nonchalance back when he was a cadet, this is what was underneath it: concern, dedication, loyalty. Shiro remembers thinking he'd have a wrinkle between his eyes by the time he was thirty and at this rate, he really might.

How can someone who remembers nothing have anything to worry about?

Shiro doesn't realize the new hand is betraying him until he can feel the contrast of rough gauze and soft hair under his metal fingers. The memory of it matted with blood is two weeks old and still fresh.

But Keith doesn't remember him, and even if he did, it wouldn't warrant this intimacy.

“Tomorrow,” he repeats to himself and drags the arm off Keith by sheer will, making for the door before he can see Keith's face and reaction. He's almost there before Keith stops him.

“Shiro?” He turns back. Keith is resting on the pillows, black hair splayed around him, eyes already half-closed, brow still pinched a little. “Thanks for coming to see me.”

Shiro nods and tries not to think about the pain that whittles its way through his chest as he walks out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [[on tumblr](http://arahir.tumblr.com/post/177464757035/have-there-been-any-sheith-fics-post-s7-about)] [[on twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir/status/1034241059532881920)]
> 
> I don't have time to edit today, so if there's anything incoherent just lmk in an ask or comment and I'll patch it up. Thanks for reading!!

**Author's Note:**

> [[on tumblr](http://arahir.tumblr.com/)] [[on twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir/)]


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